As friend and colleague Adam Liszkiewicz has recently noted, FarmVille is a terrible game. It doesn’t even really qualify as a game, under Roger Caillois’s six criteria of games, and no matter what credence you give to classical ludology, you have to admit — there is an unprecedented number of people who continue to play, despite the absence of any of the rewards of play, or any of the rewards of labor. Zynga, the company that runs FarmVille, continues to make an absurd amount of money from hooking or scamming its players. Which is something that Jesse Schell neglects to mention in his DICE 2010 talk about design outside the box.

Now, before I begin, let me make perfectly clear that I am skeptical of the idea that Caillois’s criteria constitute a complete and definitive measure of a game. (i.e., I think that Caillois’s criteria are necessary but not sufficient.) Nor am I resistant to the idea that this definition can change. However, thinking about Martin Roberts’ talk at a conference this past fall and reading a bunch of Adorno has turned me a bit curmudgeonly. Ultimately, I think there are not a lot of people who are really enthusiastic about the things that games can do, while simultaneously being skeptical about certain deployments of gaming and the “fun” buzzword. And, as an industry and community, we desperately need more of that attitude.

It only took me an hour to get through the entire voting process. Down at my polling place, there was a carnival atmosphere: at least a dozen of my friends were there around when I was there, and we had sparklers and candy and there were high-fives for everyone. We hung out with the Democratic voter assistance volunteers (one of whom was in all of my philosophy classes last year) and drank coffee and talked about the election. Spirits are high. People are counting on this.

But in Ypsilanti Township, people are waiting three or four hours to vote. In Miami-Dade, people are waiting upwards of five. It is excruciatingly clear that we are privileged. Not only did I only have to spend an hour at my polling place, I had the option to hang out and meet other voters. Economically underpivileged people, especially people who work bit jobs for hourly wages, don’t have that kind of luxury. Especially when you consider that wait times are considerably longer in underprivileged areas, you can’t help but think — this isn’t an explicit poll tax, but it might as well be. If I were working 60 hours a week and living paycheck-to-paycheck, I couldn’t spend three hours waiting to cast my ballot. If I were making just enough money to make rent and were living on food stamps, I would honestly probably choose making my money over voting. And even if I had the chance to plan ahead and sock a little extra away for November (some people still can’t do that), my employer might not be so cool with me taking off. I’m enormously privileged as a college student living in an upper middle-class community that 1) I can take time out of my day to vote and 2) there are plenty of volunteers in my area to staff my polling place.

I am not-so-secretly ashamed of myself for not volunteering in Ypsi Township.

I’m also really excited that people are using the internet to give voting social capital. While the white oval “I Voted” sticker that is on my messenger bag is pretty cool, it’s nowhere near as exciting to get involved on Facebook. Logging in this morning, I was presented with a running count of every Facebook member who has voted. I changed my status to the automated message from the Causes application (I was recruited by a friend, and have recruited two so far). The sheer numbers — nearly a million people used the Causes application to change their statuses simultaneoulsy at midnight, over 2 million have reported voting already — is something that makes it thrilling, not to mention unifying.

This is cool and everything, but how can we better use social networking tools to galvanize young people? I kind of wonder how many people would have gotten their hands dirty with this on Facebook if it weren’t such an important election to us? I hope we immediately start working on ways to motivate people in the future. Social capital is remarkably valuable, and also remarkably easy to come by on the internet. So long as you have a critical mass of users who are participating, others start paying attention.

And using online social capital to get out the vote is one thing, but it still doesn’t answer a fundamental question: how do we reenfranchise the disenfranchised? What about the voters in Ypsi Township, in Detroit, in Miami-Dade County?

Ever since the accident I’ve been curious what would happen to my digital life should I kick the physical bucket. I know most of the online media is over things like mydeathspace.com, but going over the most recent additions, I can’t help but notice most of the people on the list are in my age bracket — 18 to 25 — and the vast majority of them died in car accidents. And it’s frightening, yeah, and the fact that so many people have said to me, if something awful had happened, I wouldn’t have known, not for days, maybe not for weeks.

The hits on MySpace and this blog and Facebook would keep ticking. In fact, once people learn of someone’s death, hits tend to go up; people post memorials on comment sections; sometimes, I’ve read, family and friends try and break the password on the account to turn the profile into a memorial for the deceased. Don’t you think there’s something weird about fussing with the MySpace of the deceased? On the other hand, it is a little reminiscent of folks who have a hard time moving on and keep the room or belongings of the deceased in perfect order, as if waiting for them to return one day.

Yet the idea of our digital ghosts isn’t so much comforting as it is annoying. It seems like another way that the general public can pry into our most intimate moments in this new wired world. On the other hand, isn’t this our shot at some kind of immortality? I don’t think I’d like to be deleted from Facebook post-mortem. I have talked in the past about uploading my consciousness to the internet, so I can live forever in virtual space. In all seriousness, these online vestiges of lives lost are a little like uploading the whisper of a consciousness to the internet. A little like the first step toward digital immortality. I’m working on it, as you can see.